If you decided to become a prospering project manager, this article is just for you. People working in the field of project management often wonder about what skills and competencies are required for success. We have written many articles to answer this question so far. We discussed the competencies, educational, and management skills as well as technical skills needed for project managers. However, in this article, we will go deeper and talk about the list of technical skills in project management with examples to help you to successfully lead teams and become an effective project manager.
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What are the Technical Skills a Project Manager Needs to Succeed?
Project managers often spend their time communicating with stakeholders to understand their expectations and thoughts on the project. The project team, stakeholders, vendors, client representatives, and anyone involved in a project often go to the project manager’s room to ask questions or request something. As a result, project managers sometimes get crazy and act as a dictator to manage people and handle the situations.
In fact, telling others what they have to do or just managing people does not make you a good project manager. However, leading people instead of managing is core to the success of any project manager. Before discussing the list of technical skills in project management, we recommend you to read this article regarding the difference between leadership and management.
Actually, project managers are those who apply their knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project tasks and processes to meet the project objectives. As per this definition, we can easily understand that a project manager should possess some skills and various competencies as well as having technical knowledge.
Because without having a toolbox in place, you can not apply what you know. In the same way, without having knowledge, skills and methods become useless.
Importance of Technical Skills in Project Management
Although there are many things to be discussed regarding technical skills and competencies, we shorten our project management skills list to just seven basic areas – planning and scheduling, time management, risk management, cost management, quality management, contract management, stakeholder management.
Let’s go deeper and talk about the list of technical skills in project management with examples.
Planning and Scheduling
A project schedule demonstrates the activities, their sequence, and duration that guide project teams to develop budgets, transportation, and procurement plans. No matter how good you are at managing people and project tasks, you can not complete your project on time without having a well create project schedule in place.
From this aspect, planning and project scheduling is an important skill. Although organizing activities, tasks, and their sequence is a core business of a project manager, many of them do not pay much attention to project schedules. Successful project managers are those who give scheduling serious attention to ensure that everything is on track.
Time Management
Time management is a must-have technical skill for any project manager. A project manager spends most of his/her time communicating with people as well as attending meetings. A good project manager is one who recognizes the importance of managing time and prioritizing daily activities. Problems and issues that a project manager might face have different levels of urgencies. From this aspect, time management is a core skill for a project manager who aims at doing the right thing at the right time.
Risk Management
Risk management is key to avoid surprises that may have negative effects on the project goals. Funders and investors hate risks and surprises. As a project manager, it is your business to define, prioritize and manage risks before they become serious issues.
Risk management takes an important place in the list of technical skills in project management. If a project is deviated follow the plan, everyone asks the project manager if he has taken action to mitigate the risks and prevent the project.
Cost Management
A project manager is responsible for managing costs and expenses. Project cost management is one of the most important aspects of project management which involves creating the project budget, managing costs, and reporting performance.
If a project manager is not capable of measuring cost performance, nobody will realize if the project is above or under the budget.
Quality Management
Quality management ensures that you deliver a product by meeting quality standards that are defined in the technical specifications. However many project managers do not pay much attention to quality management. Quality management is a continuous process that starts at the beginning of the project and ends at the end of the project. As a project manager, without effective quality management, you can not improve the processes and fulfill the requirements of customers.
Contract Management
Before getting through the list of technical skills in project management, let’s discuss contract and stakeholder management skills. A contract is an agreement between two or more parties involved in a project. A project manager signs contracts with vendors, suppliers, and sub-contractors. Typically, the contract management life cycle involves the creation, negotiation, validation, execution, and closure phases. It is one of the project manager’s critical businesses to manage contracts signed with each party within the project. Note that, a project manager is also responsible for managing the contract signed with the client.
Stakeholder Management
Stakeholder management is a critical process for the success of any project. Stakeholder management is the practice of classifying stakeholders and managing them according to their power, effect, and interests on the project’s objectives. As a project manager, stakeholder management is one of your core businesses because your projects’ success depends on your stakeholder’s happiness.
What Do You Think About the Importance of Technical Skills in Project Management?
A project manager is responsible for creating the project schedule, project budget, risk management, stakeholder management, contract management, quality management, and managing other important processes within the project.
While performing these tasks, keeping your work organized and stakeholders informed and happy is critical to your success. Therefore you should possess a list of technical skills as well as having management skills.
In this article, we discuss the importance of technical skills in project management with examples. What do you think about the importance of technical skills in project management? Do you have all these skills? If you want to add additional technical skills that a project manager should have, you can do so through the comments section below.
See Also
How to become a project manager
Project Coordinator Skills and Responsibilities
Project Manager Interview Questions
External References
Irwin Michael Reston is an expert who has more than 30 years of experience in optimizing businesses, inspiring individuals and improving human resources departments. He established the BlueLight Consulting Limited to provide learning and training service worldwide.
If we are able to manage these technical skills, it means that we have a perfect project to demonstrate.
it is not all about to take this abilities. We have to know how will we use it and where will we use it.